Customer experience (CX) integrates your customers’ impression and feedback towards your business based on their encounters. It is the relationship your consumers have with your brand.
Overall, customer encounters might include their experience in navigating the website, asking for assistance from your customer service support, and trying out your new product or service.
All of these factors have significant impacts on your customers’ experience and their decision to continue patronizing your business.
Why is customer experience important?
Delivering a great customer experience is remarkably important for any business. If you can deliver and improve your customer experience, it will lead to higher repeat customers and positive reviews.
The benefits of identifying and delivering a great CX includes:
- Increased customer loyalty.
- Boosted customer satisfaction
- Good recommendations
- A more polished reputation
- Greater number of sales.
Customer experience vs. customer service
Customer experience is often interchanged and confused with customer service. The truth is, customer service is one of the components of the whole customer experience.
Customer service refers to the assistance given by support. It includes factors within the experience where a customer receives help. In other words, customer service is under the umbrella of customer experience.
But to be more specific, how do companies measure customer experience? What are the key factors you have to consider to identify and keep records of improving customer experience?
How to measure customer experience
Here are some of the most reliable measuring tools organizations use to monitor factors contributing to a better customer experience. Take a look at our list of metrics below and see if you have encountered any of them:
Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer satisfaction or CSAT is one of the most common and straightforward ways of measuring your customer experience. Companies have been using this tool for the longest time.
CSAT surveys are sent to customers immediately after a transaction, a purchase, or after support was given. The survey asks if a customer was satisfied with their experience. The total average score of the survey is the CSAT score.
Employing CSAT surveys has been proven effective by many firms to get immediate feedback from the customer on whether they enjoyed their experience or not.
Customer effort score (CES)
There’s another survey that companies use to measure customer loyalty called customer effort score or CES. However, CES doesn’t always give the full picture for customer experience.
It’s good that support teams also use other tools such as net promoter score or NPS to help with CES because your customer may have an overall fantastic relationship with your business but had one unfortunate experience.
If you only had CES to look at, you might say they aren’t loyal customers entirely. even if they just had one bad interaction. That moves us to our next point, the net promoter score.
Net promoter score (NPS)
Net promoter score or NPS is one of the most used tools in measuring customer experience. NPS calculates the percentage of customers who adore your service and products.
It also determines the number of customers who don’t like your service and products. To calculate NPS, representatives will send a survey to your customers. They ask them how likely they are to recommend you to a friend.
Customers can give you detractor scores or promote scores. With this number, you can tell how many customers are happy enough with your service and improve for those who give you detractors.
Time to resolution (TTR)
Time to resolution or TTR is the average time it takes customer service representatives to resolve an issue for their customer. Sometimes it takes days or just business hours, depending on if the quest keeps coming back and forth for support.
For a customer, the most frustrating thing is waiting too long on the line for support. That’s why TTR plays a crucial role in customer experience. It tracks and improves your service to shorten your TTR.
Delivering the best customer experience
Working towards achieving your business goals means working through your metrics.
Customer experience might seem abstract and hard to define. But with the help of the metrics we’ve shown you, you can turn these abstracts into a more understandable and concrete matter.
However, not all metrics will work for your teams’ dynamics and needs. To deliver the best customer experience, identify which metric tool will be most beneficial for your business, and you learn how to use and apply them.
At the end of the day, doing business is about changing and making an impact on your customers’ lives. The ultimate goal is for them to have a one-of-a-kind customer experience.
